Sparkcentral: Secrets Of Selling To The Enterprise

Workday, which provides cloud-based ERP services, posted a blow-out quarter. And on the news, the stock price is up 13% and the market cap is nearly $20 billion. The company continues to show that enterprises are quickly adopting cloud solutions.

In light of this, many entrepreneurs are rushing to start cloud companies. Yet it could prove harder than a looks. Let’s face it, snagging enterprise customers can take a long time.

So to get advice on strategies, I recently talked to Davy Kestens, who is the CEO and co-founder of Sparkcentral. The firm has built a real-time social media customer service platform. And yes, the traction has been strong. Just some of the clients include biggies like Delta Air Lines, Virgin Australia, SWISS International Air Lines, Alaska Air and Brussels Airlines. These companies use Sparkcentral to handle high volumes of social media chatter. Rather than treating customers as cases or ticket numbers, the cloud-based platform enables enterprises to put the relationship with the individual customer first—no matter how many people need help at once.

So here’s what Davy had to say:

Tom Taulli: How is selling to the enterprise different from selling to SMBs?

Davy Kestens: Enterprise sales are relationship sales. It often even means building relationships with several people within an organization, which is the mother of a long sales cycle.

It takes a lot of effort to establish trust with stakeholders in the enterprise, which is why most startups don’t seem to compete for that market from the get-go.

When you sell into a SMB, people sign up for the service, word spreads and, eventually, your product reaches critical mass. This is how Dropbox originally approached the market in its infancy. That approach often won’t work in the enterprise environment, because workers often don’t have the decision-making or technical capacity to even do a trial with a new piece of software. A specialized IT department will often need to get involved. You have to put a lot of time and thought into getting in front of the right individuals and navigating your way through the corporate ladder.

Apart from the long sales process, there are also added requirements from a product and service perspective. Enterprises have higher demands for security, support, and scalability. As a small startup, it’s also harder to put up aggressive pricing structures when you’re being pulled through purchasing and procurement processes.

Taulli: How do you initiate contact with large enterprises?

Kestens: Hustle is the name of the startup game. We find the right people with the appropriate titles and we target them by use case. We pitch them through emails and, less frequently, through cold calls. If a prospect is in the same vertical as an existing enterprise customer, we share the established customer’s use case. Most of our customers are recognizable global brands, so it resonates when we point prospects to existing customers’ case studies.

Inbound word-of-mouth leads are great, but when you’re a relatively new startup in the enterprise space and have received little press, you can’t rely on that. Setting up good sales processes, lead-gen, outbound activities and working with clear target lists will be vital. Outbound messaging needs to be crystal clear, otherwise it won’t work.

Taulli: How do you get decision makers interested?

Kestens: After we’ve established that they’re interested in Sparkcentral, we focus on building a trusted relationship with them. You can’t underestimate the power of some older sales techniques: face-to-face meetings, speaking at conferences, even snail mail.

We prioritize in-person meetings with clients that we think will have a long lifespan and high growth potential. We’ve sent leaders a folder containing the use case of another brand in their industry that’s already a customer, and we add a personal note. Lots of enterprises attend niche conferences, and we’ve found that the relationships we build there are well-worth the price of the admission in the long term. I’m not saying this means you need to fly out and go party at SXSW with your seed funding, but carefully selecting focused events filled with prospects is a good strategy.

The bottom line with the enterprise is that once they like your product and they like you as an individual, they’ll sometimes convert into advocates and start pitching you internally and influence the decision-making process. This is gold.

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